Way to make video-thumbnails generate from VLC instead of Totem?

I'm suffering from problem that video-thumbnails do not appear in nautilus for some video files. I just found this bug typefinding: some mpeg files are not identified as mpeg files which seems to address the problem. I don't understand the specifics as reported in this bug report, but it sounds like it's a problem with Totem's interaction with Gstreamer.

Since all my videos play fine with VLC (and they don't all play with Totem), I don't use Totem very much. Is there a way to make VLC generate the video-thumbnails instead of having to rely on the buggy gstreamer/totem? I made VLC my default video player but this had no effect on the display of video-thumbnails. If Totem can't play the video file, then I get no thumbnail. But VLC can play the videos fine, so why can't VLC create a video-thumbnail for it?

Solution 1:

First, make sure all the ffmpeg (the back of vlc) components you need are installed:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg ffmpegthumbnailer gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Clear the thumbnail cache, with bleachbit, ubuntu tweak, or this command:

rm ~/.thumbnails/fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory/*
rm ~/.thumbnails/normal/*

Now we need to tell Ubuntu not to use totem, but to use ffmpeg instead.
sudo nano /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer and replace all the ext in totem.thumbnailer with the following:

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=ffmpegthumbnailer
Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10
MimeType=application/mxf;application/ogg;application/ram;application/sdp;application/vnd.ms-wpl;application/vnd.rn-realmedia;application/x-extension-m4a;application/x-extension-mp4;application/x-flash-video;application/x-matroska;application/x-netshow-channel;application/x-ogg;application/x-quicktimeplayer;application/x-shorten;image/vnd.rn-realpix;image/x-pict;misc/ultravox;text/x-google-video-pointer;video/3gpp;video/dv;video/fli;video/flv;video/mp2t;video/mp4;video/mp4v-es;video/mpeg;video/msvideo;video/ogg;video/quicktime;video/vivo;video/vnd.divx;video/vnd.rn-realvideo;video/vnd.vivo;video/webm;video/x-anim;video/x-avi;video/x-flc;video/x-fli;video/x-flic;video/x-flv;video/x-m4v;video/x-matroska;video/x-mpeg;video/x-ms-asf;video/x-ms-asx;video/x-msvideo;video/x-ms-wm;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-ms-wmx;video/x-ms-wvx;video/x-nsv;video/x-ogm+ogg;video/x-theora+ogg;video/x-totem-stream;audio/x-pn-realaudio;audio/3gpp;audio/ac3;audio/AMR;audio/AMR-WB;audio/basic;audio/midi;audio/mp2;audio/mp4;audio/mpeg;audio/ogg;audio/prs.sid;audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;audio/x-aiff;audio/x-ape;audio/x-flac;audio/x-gsm;audio/x-it;audio/x-m4a;audio/x-matroska;audio/x-mod;audio/x-mp3;audio/x-mpeg;audio/x-ms-asf;audio/x-ms-asx;audio/x-ms-wax;audio/x-ms-wma;audio/x-musepack;audio/x-pn-aiff;audio/x-pn-au;audio/x-pn-wav;audio/x-pn-windows-acm;audio/x-realaudio;audio/x-real-audio;audio/x-sbc;audio/x-speex;audio/x-tta;audio/x-wav;audio/x-wavpack;audio/x-vorbis;audio/x-vorbis+ogg;audio/x-xm;application/x-flac;

And exit nautilus:

nautilus -q

Go to you video and see the thumbnail preview appear for all videos.

Solution 2:

As of Vivid the only package needed is ffmpegthumbnailer:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ffmpegthumbnailer

And the lines to be replaced are only the TryExec=[...] and Exec=[...] lines (this is a one-liner to be executed from the command-line to replace both):

sudo sed -i 's/^TryExec=.*$/TryExec=ffmpegthumbnailer/; s/^Exec=.*$/Exec=ffmpegthumbnailer -s %s -i %i -o %o -c png -f -t 10/' /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer

Then as usual one should close nautilus and remove the ~/.cache/thumbnails folder:

nautilus -q && rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails